0:0 - We have a lot of scripture this morning.
0:4 - Reading from a bunch of different passages, and then I hope throughout the message, you'll probably see the picture as we read it, but we'll spend the rest of the time also trying to unpack what we get as we read here.
0:17 - All right, so our first text this morning comes from Second Samuel 15 and 16, and it's excerpts from the text.
0:27 - So it's not the whole thing, but it's verses I kind of picked out to kind of tell the story that I'm hoping that we'll see this morning.
0:34 - Now, let's pray together before we begin.
0:37 - Lord God, may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be pleasing and honourable to you, O Lord, our God, our Rock, and our Redeemer.
0:48 - Amen.
0:49 - Okay, to Samuel 15 and 16.
0:54 - In the course of time, Absalom provided himself with a chariot and horses and with 50 men to run ahead of him.
1:3 - And a messenger came and told David, the hearts of the people of Israel are with Absalom.
1:10 - Then David said to all his officials who were with him in Jerusalem, come, we must flee or none of us will escape from Absalom.
1:19 - The king's officials answered him, your servants are ready to do whatever our Lord the king chooses.
1:25 - The king set out with his entire household following him and they halted at the edge of the city.
1:32 - David continued up the Mount of Olives, weeping as he went.
1:37 - His head was covered and he was barefoot.
1:40 - All the people with him covered their heads too and were weeping as they went up.
1:46 - When David had gone a short distance beyond the summit, there was Ziba, the steward of Mephibosheth, waiting to meet him.
1:56 - He had a string of donkeys saddled and loaded with 200 loaves of bread, 100 cakes of raisins and 100 cakes of figs and a skin of wine.
2:6 - The king said to Ziba, why have you brought these?
2:11 - Ziba answered, the donkeys are for the king's household to ride on, the bread and the fruit are for the men to eat, and the wine is to refresh those who become exhausted in the wilderness.
2:28 - Next text, Zechariah 9 verses 9 and 10.
2:32 - Rejoice greatly, daughter Zion, shout, daughter Jerusalem.
2:38 - See your king comes to you righteous and victorious, lowly and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.
2:48 - I will take away the chariots from Ephraim, and the war horses from Jerusalem and the battle bow will be broken.
2:56 - He will proclaim peace to the nations.
2:59 - His rule will extend from sea to sea and from the river to the ends of the earth.
3:6 - Next text, Matthew 21 verses 1 to 11.
3:12 - As they approached Jerusalem and came to Bethpage on the Mount of Olives, Jesus sent two disciples saying to them, go to the village ahead of you, and at once you will find a donkey tied there with her colt by her.
3:28 - Untie them and bring them to me.
3:30 - If anyone says anything to you, say the Lord needs them, and he will send them right away.
3:35 - This took place to fulfill what was spoken through the prophet.
3:40 - And this verse is quoting directly from Zechariah.
3:43 - Since we already read it, I'll skip it here.
3:46 - The disciples went and did as Jesus had instructed them.
3:51 - They brought the donkey and the colt and placed their cloaks on them for Jesus to sit on.
3:56 - A very large crowd spread their cloaks on the road while others cut branches from the trees and spread them on the road.
4:5 - The crowd that went ahead of him and those following shouted, Hosanna to the son of David.
4:13 - Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord, Hosanna in the highest heaven.
4:19 - When Jesus entered Jerusalem, the whole city was stirred and asked, who is this?
4:25 - The crowd answered, this is Jesus, the prophet from Nazareth in Galilee.
4:32 - And then a few more verses that followed the same story in the Gospel of Luke.
4:36 - I wanted to grab this picture.
4:38 - I like the Matthew narrative, but it didn't have this little bit in it, so I grabbed this from the Luke narrative as well.
4:44 - As he approached Jerusalem and saw the city, he wept over it and said, if you, even you, had only known on this day what would bring you peace, but now it is hidden from your eyes.
5:0 - The day will come upon you when your enemies will build an embankment against you and encircle you and hem you in on every side.
5:6 - They will dash you to the ground, you and the children within your walls.
5:12 - They will not leave one stone on another because you did not recognize the time of God's coming to you.
5:21 - And then finally, the verse from John chapter 19, and we've been working through our Lent series, which is all of the different words of Jesus that he shares while on the Cross.
5:35 - And this is the one that we are focusing on this Palm Sunday of Lent later.
5:40 - Knowing that everything had been finished and so that scripture would be fulfilled, Jesus said, and these are the words we reflected on last week, I am thirsty.
5:50 - A jar of wine vinegar was there so they soaked a sponge in it, put the sponge on a stalk of the hyssop plant and lifted it to Jesus' lips.
5:58 - When he had received the drink, Jesus said, and these are the words we focus on this morning, it is finished.
6:6 - With that, he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.
6:13 - This is the word of the Lord.
6:17 - All right, so lots of scripture this morning, and it's to help us to see a bigger picture.
6:26 - Jesus says, it is finished.
6:29 - We're going to spend some time trying to understand what Jesus means by this.
6:34 - We have these words that are just black and white on the page.
6:38 - It's a generic statement.
6:39 - It is finished.
6:42 - Now, when we have that, simply that, just text on a page, it's hard for us to understand the feeling or the emotion behind it or exactly what is all meant by this statement.
6:56 - There's a few different ways that we could take a statement like this.
6:59 - Is this a statement of resignation?
7:1 - Is this a proud moment of accomplishment?
7:4 - What does Jesus mean when he says these words?
7:11 - There's other ways in English for us to say it is finished.
7:15 - And when we say them, maybe sayings or idioms in our own language, it gives us clues of what is meant.
7:22 - It gives us a baked in meaning with the way we speak.
7:25 - Let me give you some examples.
7:28 - What's done is done.
7:30 - Sometimes we say that if something's finished, we might say what's done is done.
7:34 - Now this admits that something is finished, but it's not a proud claim of celebration.
7:41 - It's more of a resignation to the way things are.
7:46 - It's like saying that something happened and we can't do anything about it.
7:52 - We're victims of it and we don't really like it, but it is what it is.
7:59 - So that's one way of saying it is finished.
8:2 - I'll pull one from my history.
8:6 - I don't even know if this is a Dutch word, but I've heard this from really Dutch people and they might say, he-he.
8:14 - Has anyone heard that?
8:15 - He-he.
8:18 - It's like saying that was difficult, but we overcame it.
8:23 - We accomplished this.
8:24 - It was a challenge, but it's kind of a lighthearted thing to say, at least in my experience.
8:30 - It might be the thing you say if a child spills milk and then you clean it up afterwards.
8:36 - It might not be an appropriate response for, let's say, if your basement flooded and a bunch of your stuff got wrecked and then you spent all this time cleaning it up.
8:44 - He-he might feel a little light in that situation.
8:49 - But we know what it means when that's said.
8:50 - It's another way of announcing that something's finished, that there's finality.
8:55 - Or how about this one?
8:56 - That ship has sailed.
8:59 - That ship has sailed.
9:0 - All right, this highlights that something is finished, but it acknowledges a missed opportunity.
9:8 - Like something should have happened, but it didn't happen.
9:12 - So we've missed out.
9:16 - You see, you see what I'm doing here?
9:17 - When you get these words, it is finished, just these words on the page, it doesn't help us to know what is meant or said here.
9:28 - But we do have clues.
9:29 - There is ways that we can get help with this.
9:32 - And one of those ways is to look at the original Greek language.
9:37 - I don't like, it's like, oops, my MDiv is showing or something like that.
9:40 - It's like a pretentious thing to talk about the Greek sometimes, or it feels that way sometimes.
9:45 - But there are clues in the original language when we look at this stuff.
9:50 - So, in the Greek, the word for finished could maybe better be translated as accomplished.
9:57 - It is accomplished.
9:59 - And when we hear it that way, we understand that there's this sense of healthy completion.
10:7 - It's like a celebration of a purpose that has been achieved.
10:12 - It's a positive statement.
10:15 - So, what Jesus is saying here, he's not just assigning himself as a victim to circumstances.
10:22 - He's not crying about a missed opportunity.
10:26 - This is a proclamation of conquest, of victory.
10:32 - This is Christ saying that the work that he has set out to do has been done, and the purposes of God have been fulfilled.
10:45 - That's important, like we learned last week.
10:47 - This isn't just victim Jesus crying out with no authority, with no power.
10:54 - This is a victory moment, a victory statement.
10:59 - Now, there's more clues than just the original language.
11:3 - There's also the entire story of Scripture as another indicator.
11:8 - We can see from this grand arc of the story in the Bible, this narrative that we have from Genesis to Revelation, that this is the climax of the story.
11:20 - That's been ongoing for a lot longer than we just in this one story that we read.
11:25 - And Scripture's like that.
11:27 - It's a collection, it's a story, but it's a collection of stories.
11:31 - And they're all working together to tell one story.
11:35 - It's like the work of a cross stitch, where every woven thread, different colors and patterns, they work together to illustrate a larger picture.
11:46 - And often what we try to do when we work through texts, whether we do it in a Bible study or whether we do it here together Sunday morning, is to illustrate the small story with the bigger story.
11:58 - And what we try to do is maybe tug on one of those threads in the cross stitch.
12:3 - And when you tug on it, sometimes it highlights or illuminates how you can see it moving through the rest of the picture, how it's building to one climax or one conclusion.
12:15 - And this is the conclusion, this is the point, that Jesus, this is the thread we're gonna pull on.
12:23 - It's a king thread.
12:26 - Jesus is the victorious king that Israel was promised and was waiting for.
12:32 - And Jesus' work on the cross is the completion and fulfillment of everything that happened before.
12:39 - It's the completion of the king's work.
12:44 - Okay?
12:45 - Alright, so let's take a look at that bigger story now.
12:47 - So Israel, they're God's chosen people.
12:50 - They're this group that God has decided.
12:52 - They're gonna be the ones to carry out his mission, his ministry, his message to the world.
13:0 - And through the first half of the Old Testament, God is their king.
13:5 - God is the king of Israel, but Israel wants to have a human king, like the other nations around them, and God knows that's not best for them, but they ask for a king, and he gives it to them anyway.
13:17 - Sometimes I think of the image of Genie with Aladdin.
13:20 - Like Aladdin, he's like, Aladdin asks for something inappropriate, that's not good for him, and the Genie knows, but he almost looks away and like points his finger, like he's gonna grant the wish, but he knows that it's not best.
13:33 - And it's like Israel is looking to God to be their Genie, and they're asking for something that's not good for them, and God does give them what they ask for.
13:42 - Because human kings, they can't provide for Israel near as well as God can, but they end up getting a pretty good one at least, King David.
13:52 - He is a man after God's own heart.
13:55 - He is the best king that Israel ever has, and he leads the people well.
14:3 - He leads them well to worshiping God.
14:5 - He models it well, and he helps them as messengers to the world.
14:10 - He teaches them how to be God's children.
14:15 - But David, of course, is still human.
14:18 - He's not a king as good as God the king, and so he messes up, and we have stories where we see David stealing and killing and destroying and God punishes him for this.
14:31 - He tells him that he's going to lose his role as Israel's king.
14:34 - And God tells him that the kingdom will fall into bad hands, that his own children will betray him.
14:41 - But there was a previous promise to David that was still there, that still existed, because God had promised David your throne and kingdom will last forever before the Lord.
14:54 - That promise is still there.
14:56 - So sure enough, the punishment comes true, and David's son Absalom rises to overthrow David.
15:3 - And fun fact here, Absalom, as we see in the English, is two words in Hebrew, Av, which means father, and Sallam, which is actually Shalom, which means peace, right?
15:17 - So what his name means is father of peace.
15:22 - Absalom's name means father of peace, which David named him.
15:26 - So it shows David's hope for his son, yet he becomes the exact opposite.
15:31 - He becomes the fulfillment of God's punishment against David, bringing basically civil war back to Israel.
15:39 - And David is exiled.
15:42 - David is sent away, and we see him pass through the Mount of Olives, the Mount of Olives.
15:51 - And he is with all, the people are watching him go, and he and the people are weeping for Jerusalem.
16:1 - God's good king is forced out by this father, the supposed father of peace, who's bringing destruction.
16:10 - And something I never noticed before in this story, as I read it this week, he and his followers, as they pass the summit of the Mount of Olives, as they're leaving the city, as they're sad and lamenting what is lost, they're riding donkeys.
16:26 - So David is exiled.
16:28 - And exile is a theme that we see over and over in the Old Testament.
16:32 - Whenever Israel fails, God exiles them from the good land.
16:36 - That's what happens time and time again, which brings us to our next text, which is Zechariah 9.
16:43 - And this text is well known to us.
16:47 - It's a famous prophecy that points to the future Messiah, to this great king that will come and rescue Israel, a king in the line of David.
16:59 - But this text is not just a prophecy for the original hearers.
17:4 - You gotta remember that.
17:5 - Any text that's a prophecy, there's meaning for the people who are receiving it right then.
17:11 - It's not just about the future.
17:13 - So, they would not just hear it as what is to come, but they would remember what they had.
17:21 - Because the text itself has a description that paints a picture, a picture that was known to Israel.
17:28 - They had the stories from 2 Samuel.
17:32 - So, the original hearers of this text, the ones that Zachariah is writing to, is a beaten up and broken down group of people.
17:41 - They're without a king.
17:42 - And they themselves have also been exiled.
17:46 - They've been forced out of the promised land because of their own failures.
17:50 - And they're recently back to the land, but the land needs work.
17:54 - The temple's destroyed, they need a new king, they gotta rebuild.
17:59 - And Zachariah is this prophet that's calling them to repent, to live differently, and he's trying to provide them with new hope through this prophecy.
18:11 - So, think about how these words would have sounded to them.
18:14 - Okay, we think about it as pointing forward to a prophecy, but how would they have heard it?
18:20 - See your king comes to you, righteous and victorious, lowly and riding on a donkey, on a colt full of a donkey.
18:27 - I will take the chariots of Ephraim and the war horses from Jerusalem, and the battle bow will be broken.
18:33 - He will proclaim peace to the nations.
18:36 - He will rule, his rule will extend from sea to sea and from the river to the ends of the earth.
18:42 - Now this original audience, they would immediately remember their great king David, a king that they longed for in those days.
18:51 - They would love to have David come back.
18:54 - They would remember his greatness, but they would also remember the fact that he was exiled, that when he left the Mount of Olives, he was on a donkey.
19:3 - They would remember the war horses and the chariots of this supposed father of peace, Absalom, and the destruction that that brought to Israel.
19:13 - And they would have wondered, what does Zachariah mean with this description?
19:19 - It's kind of confusing.
19:22 - Will this next king return from exile the same way that David left?
19:27 - Is that what Zachariah is saying?
19:30 - And for more than 600 years, Israel would wrestle with this passage, wondering what does this mean?
19:38 - And they would, they were seeking to rebuild Israel to its former glory.
19:42 - They're looking for a new king, a new savior.
19:46 - They're waiting for a descendant of David, because that's what was promised, to reestablish the kingdom.
19:54 - And so today is Palm Sunday in the life of the church.
19:57 - And as we process our next text, we learn and see how this day earned its name.
20:5 - Because Jesus is entering Jerusalem.
20:8 - It's the capital city.
20:10 - This is the holy place that stands for a restored kingdom.
20:16 - And he's riding on a donkey.
20:20 - And Jesus himself is like a prophet, like Zechariah, because he plans all of this and he sets it up.
20:27 - He ensures that there is a donkey for him to ride.
20:30 - It's not just a chance.
20:32 - He orchestrates this exact situation.
20:36 - So Jesus passes through again the Mount of Olives.
20:41 - This is what drew me to that Old Testament text this week, as I started looking up the Old Testament significance of the Mount of Olives.
20:49 - It's the exact same location that David rode a donkey through as he was exiled.
20:57 - And David was crying for Jerusalem.
21:1 - But not just David.
21:2 - All of the people were crying with him because they were sad to see David go.
21:8 - And now Jesus, he's not leaving.
21:11 - He's riding into Jerusalem.
21:13 - And the people are not crying.
21:16 - They're celebrating.
21:18 - They're calling him king and messiah.
21:20 - And the text even highlights that they say he is from the line of David.
21:26 - Yet, interestingly, Jesus is crying.
21:30 - Jesus is weeping because he knows that these people don't get it.
21:38 - They think Jesus is gonna be a king like David.
21:41 - They think he's gonna be one that fights wars and battles, another human king that will spill blood and seek revenge on behalf of Israel.
21:52 - But Jesus knows this is not the path.
21:55 - It's not the plan.
21:58 - He is the real prince of peace, unlike Absalom or David.
22:3 - He's seeking peace and mercy, but he will accomplish it.
22:9 - Blood will be spilled, but it's his own blood, only sacrificing himself so that he can rescue not just Israel, but all of creation.
22:23 - And Jesus is weeping, because he knows that these same people in a few short days will turn on him when they start to wonder if he's different than David and Absalom.
22:39 - He gets arrested and accused for these crimes, and things are going south, and they abandon him immediately.
22:48 - And on the Cross, in his suffering, he says it is accomplished.
22:55 - It's not just the task of suffering and dying, but it's the role of Israel's human king that they asked for, who is also the one true God King, who is perfectly qualified and equipped to be Israel's king.
23:16 - He does what Israel was hoping for and longing for for thousands of years.
23:21 - Jesus does what God would promise would happen all the way back in the Garden of Eden when humans first fell into sin, this trap that they couldn't remove for themselves.
23:34 - You see, when the Israelite people wanted a man great and humble like David, that's what they said.
23:44 - We want someone great and humble like David, but they also wanted someone with the strength and the power and the bloodlust of Absalom.
23:54 - That's what they wanted, but it's not what they needed.
24:0 - Sure, a king like that could maybe overthrow the Romans and help them end this war and rebuild their land and their temple, but we only need to look around us today to know that that kind of war, that kind of victory can only be temporary.
24:20 - That war just continually repeats itself.
24:25 - And that war might have won peace for Israel, but it would have done nothing for all of creation.
24:35 - It's not the peace that is needed for God's people, for God's world here today.
24:45 - It's not the peace that you need today.
24:50 - Christ's victory has won you peace.
24:53 - Through Christ, you have been rescued, you have been reconciled to God.
24:58 - Through Jesus' death, resurrection, and his ascension to heaven, and interestingly, the ascension also happened at the Mount of Olives, by the way, but that's a sermon for another time.
25:11 - Victory has been accomplished, but things clearly aren't just finished.
25:20 - It's another thing, when we heard these words, it is finished.
25:25 - When we look around us, we still see suffering, we still see death, we still see wars, we still see greedy people, we still see people clutching for power and revenge, and we see violence all around us.
25:41 - So, not everything is finished.
25:46 - And that's where we come in together collectively as the church, the bride of Christ.
25:54 - Even though Christ has accomplished the great victory over human sin and separation from God, people around us don't appear to understand that yet.
26:8 - We don't appear to understand that yet.
26:14 - We, us here, must confess, and the rest of the world must know that we are still held into slavery and captivity to all kinds of things that Christ, that were crucified with Christ.
26:30 - We're prisoners to all kinds of suffering.
26:34 - And so we have a mission.
26:36 - We have a ministry that's needed here in this place.
26:39 - We don't need to save others.
26:43 - We need to help them to see and understand that they are already saved, that God has already rescued them.
26:52 - This is the good news of the Gospel.
26:56 - This is what we're called to.
26:58 - We're called to give witness.
27:0 - We're called to shine a light that illustrates what Christ has done.
27:6 - This is our role and our responsibility.
27:10 - And we do this knowing that the victory over sin and death was accomplished by Jesus himself.
27:18 - It was God who rescued us and restored something we could never do.
27:23 - And we simply need to share and spread that news through our words, but also through our hands.
27:30 - And I pray for you as you seek to live that out to a hurting and broken world.
27:36 - But also these are lessons we still need to learn ourselves.
27:40 - These are things that we still mess up and don't see clearly.
27:45 - So, let's pray together as we come before our God.
27:51 - Lord God, you have mission and ministry for us, and it doesn't find us going to a cross so that we can rescue a broken world.
28:3 - You've already done that.
28:6 - But it does have us giving witness to what you have done.
28:10 - And sometimes that's going to bring us to places of hardship and suffering.
28:15 - It's going to bring us to places where we have to let go of our own ideas of control, and we have to give ourselves over to what you have said is good and what you have said is right.
28:29 - God, we're called to do that for those that you've placed in our lives.
28:34 - We're called to do that in our families.
28:36 - We're called to do that in our church.
28:38 - We're called to do that in our communities and our workplaces.
28:42 - So, God, I ask that you bless and empower these people, your church, as they seek to live this out.
28:50 - Give them humility to know that they don't have to do it all.
28:54 - Give them grace for themselves and others as we see the ways that we don't get it and don't understand.
29:2 - And Lord God, thank you so much that you walk with us and beside us.
29:7 - In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.
29:11 - Amen.